Smaller SIM Packaging

As part of giffgaff’s ethos of being environmentally friendly, I feel that the idea to change how we look at our SIM packaging is required. My focus in this idea is the plastic SIM holder users receive to show the activation code, and then house the SIM.

What can be done?

It’s simple, this extra space is not needed at all, and we could shrink the plastic holder by half and still have sufficient space needed for the plastic holder to serve its purpose. Shrinking this would make things different; only one other network orange has done this, as you will see with the image below:

What would this mean for giffgaff?

Half the amount of waste

Would make the company more sustainable, and a much greener business

Would expand on giffgaff’s ethos of being green, and efficient

Would reduce the weight of SIM packages

Enable giffgaff to ship more SIMs per envelope

Overall, the production costs would be far less than producing SIM cases double the size.

If we was to reduce the Size of the SIM package, it would indeed save giffgaff money, I also think that it adds a more unique approach on how things are looked at. Obviously giffgaff are extraordinary, they’re different, so to see this change would most certainly show the idea of this.

Size does matter – And using the smaller SIM cases would overall reduce costs. The only issue as it stands is the number of batches of the original size we have. This isn’t much of a problem, as they’ve already done the damage, giffgaff have paid for this, if the idea was to be implemented, we could see this happen when the old batches have all gone.

Looking at the scale of the issue, more than 2.9 billion SIM cards weighing 11,600 tonnes were shipped to mobile operators across the globe in 2008* – Giffgaff could change this. Orange have already started the process, and have received recognition for doing such thing.

I have gone and got an Orange reduced SIM holder, and taken a photo in comparison to giffgaff's below:

Hi all, this idea is very inline with our environmentally friendly values, and it's an area of interest tha we want to explore more. In this particular idea our hands are a bit tied by the options open to us, so unfortunately it's not something that we can do at the moment. We still want to hear all of your ideas for how we can be more environmentally conscious, so keep them coming.

yaakov - I think the vast majority of people use a phone that uses a Mini-SIM - how many phones are you aware of that are still in operation that use a full size SIM card? I haven't seen one used for many years.